PayPal is acquiring risk management platform Simility for $120 million in cash after investing in the company last year. It will help PayPal merchants avoid fraud.
It is the latest in a string of acquisitions by PayPal over the past 12 months, including Swift Financial, iZettle, Jetlore and Hyperwallet. PayPal Chief Operating Officer Bill Ready said the acquisitions are “part of a concerted effort to strengthen the suite of services we can provide to merchants in order to become the one-stop solution for global commerce.”
Ready said fraudsters have taken note of the exploding growth of digital commerce and are adapting and developing new methods to carry out their crimes. “PayPal has been at the forefront of developing innovative fraud prevention and risk management solutions for nearly 20 years and is uniquely positioned to help merchants fight this threat,” he said.
With Simility, PayPal will offer merchants on its platform access to fraud tools that can be customized through their existing account management dashboard.
Simility says it helps businesses orchestrate complex decisions to reduce friction, improve trust and solve complex fraud problems by combining artificial intelligence and big data analytics.
In its announcement, PayPal explained that Simility machine learning-powered tools not only help reduce fraudulent payment activity, but in some cases, they verify transactions that may have otherwise failed.
PayPal is playing $120 million in cash for Simility, subject to certain adjustments. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018 subject to customary closing conditions.
Once the acquisition closes, Simility CEO Rahul Pangam and the Simility team will report to VP of Enterprise Services Platforms Tushar Shah, who has been with PayPal since 2012. It will keep Simility’s office in India.
PayPal’s Ready said, “We invested in Simility last year because we believe the company has a unique approach that goes beyond legacy, static rule-based fraud and risk offerings and puts control in merchants’ hands to offer increased protection in a mobile world.”
